Caring for working citizens, families should be important to city's leaders

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Published
7:00 pm CDT, Monday, July 23, 2012

To the editor:

Yes, I care and care is not a dirty word and caring for others that need help is not a crime—something bad or dirty.

What would I do if I were the mayor of this city?

First, I would come down to earth and bring all the council members and the city manager with me.

I would talk to the average Joe or Juan and Jane or Juanita, the everyday working people who do the work and know how hard it is to make ends meet from day to day.

Keeping up with kids is not easy when you get home from work tired and kids want and need your attention.

They feel not wanted or cared for by the parents when little or no attention is given to them.

In my view, what are needed are programs like woodworking, fixing furniture and building and remodeling houses, area industry programs like welding or operating trucks, backhoes and earthmovers, (learning) how to load and unload cargo in a safe way, warehouse work, how to operate a forklift or keep inventory.

In the arts, things like designing ads, making signs, decorations in a house or business and outside in the yard, workshops for teenagers on how to do useful work that stays a lifetime, ways to make a living.

We have kids die from drug overdoses because of a lack of knowledge, from the kids not knowing any better to adults who do not care to know any better.

Kids do not know that they have a bright future full of life.

We keep shortchanging the young men and women by not investing in their future and just keep putting them in correctional institutions and prisons that are shops where they get better at committing more crimes from the older inmates.

Instead of putting the money in prisons, it should be invested in basic working skills programs, how to think and make a living where they feel fulfilled and rewarded with the skills they learn.

It seems like many who go to college do so, so they can come home to take from the taxpayers and forget about the taxpayers’ needs until elections come around.

Pay them for the work done, not for how many diplomas they have.

Even those who earned their diplomas, in one way or another, used tax money to enable them to complete their studies.